Flavio Robatto Tactics At Club Bolívar 2025: Can City Football Group’s Positional Play Project Conquer South America? – Tactical Analysis

Club Bolívar is the sensation of Bolivian football right now, especially on the international stage.

The good results achieved in the Copa Sudamericana invite optimism, with four victories in four matches, after entering the competition by finishing third in their Copa Libertadores group.

Scoring 10 goals and conceding none against Palestino and Cienciano in the Playoffs and Round of 16, respectively, Flavio Robatto’s team dreams big, now set to face the giant Atlético Mineiro from Brazil in the quarterfinals.

With a fresh and bold style and a methodology based on positional play, Robatto’s side takes risks uncommon for a team from a smaller country on the continent.

Bolívar, which has been part of the City Football Group since 2021, applies all the maxims of positional models: rational occupation of lanes, maximum width, and fostering the creation of triangles and diamonds to generate two or three passing lines for the ball carrier.

All these principles on the field have the macro objective of creating superiority across the entire pitch, numerical, qualitative, positional, or socio-affective.

These superiorities are backed by travelling together with the ball.

Thus, Bolívar have developed over the past nearly two years under Robatto’s direction, with a qualification to the Round of 16 in the 2024 Copa Libertadores (eliminated by Flamengo), and their current survival in the Copa Sudamericana.

In this tactical football analysis, we aim to break down and analyse some aspects that distinguish the playing model of the Bolivian team.

Bolívar Geometry As A Collective Language

The first noticeable trait of Bolívar is their subscription to a collective geometry on the pitch that serves as a shared language.

Midfielders positioned in three staggered heights and on a diagonal.

For Robatto, the initial setup is not a straitjacket, but a starting point that transforms according to the movements of his players.

What matters is not who occupies a space, but that the space is never empty, and that the network of relationships maintains the flow of the game.